Previously, academic paintings were the preservers of traditional French painting rules of content and style. Most works, including still life, portraits and even landscapes, were finished in a studio. While the early Impressionists violated these traditional standards. They went to country and streets for natural moments of outdoors, which relaxed the boundary of compositions and backgrounds from arranged subjects. As the newest Optics Theory, they tried to represent the momentary and transient subjects under the sunlight at different time. Thus these fleeting real scenes could be kept forever on the Impressionists’ canvases.
Impression Sunrise
This rise of Impressionism style started with Impression,Sunrise of Claude Monet. He was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's theory of showing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The expression of shadow and light was his skilled techniques. Clear outlines and distinct shadows were not appeared on his paintings. In order to pursue perfect expression of different colors and lights, he had practiced numerous paintings with one theme.Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
Impression,Sunrise depicted a landscape in the harbor of Le Havre. It was created in 1873 by Claude Monet. During the first independent art show, Critic Louis Leroy disparaged this painting as “just impression”, from which the name derived. It snapshotted the sunrise in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground. At first sight, the sun seemed to be the brightest spot on this canvas, but, it was actually as bright as the sky. "If you make a black and white copy of Impression,Sunrise, the Sun disappears entirely," said a professor. He focused on portraying overall visual effects instead of details, and used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed color, with "tacit imperatives of taste and conscience". Intense color vibration has provoked the rigid Academy's reaction. In spite of this, Impressionism,Sunrise marked the beginning of Impressionism, which based on the original expression of light and color. This movement quickly gained favor because the public gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and natural vision.
